


please could you be tender (and i will sit close to you)

by possibilist



Series: perfect places [1]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F, who knows! not me!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-08
Updated: 2018-05-08
Packaged: 2019-05-03 20:02:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14576583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilist/pseuds/possibilist
Summary: you walk with her to another booth after she pays for her lavender soap with perfectly exact change. the owner is kind, keeps her own bees with her wife, offers you a sample. lexa is careful when she tastes it, only a small amount, but you squeeze the tiny stick into your mouth quickly, the plastic fading away until there’s only cinnamon, only honey.idk clarke & lexa fall in love. theyre dramatic & happy & soft





	please could you be tender (and i will sit close to you)

 

you meet her at the market on a saturday morning; your parents had dragged you with them even though you were a full-blown adult and were just at their house for the long weekend.

it’s in the park and you’ve wandered off, and then you see her smell a bar of lavender soap and close her eyes and the sun hits her just right, the wild curls of her hair and her sharp cheekbones and you’re struck. she’s so beautiful, in a  t-shirt and jeans and vans with a hole in the right toe, mismatched socks. later you’ll remember these things, you’ll learn them better: she will never throw away sneakers so you will; she loses socks nearly every time she sends out for laundry; she always smells like flowers.

but for now, you walk over, almost against your will because you’re pretty but you are sad, sometimes, and she looks  _happy,_  light; unbearably so.

but you smell a bar of soap next to her, gag because it’s truly terrible, and she laughs and turns toward you, all green eyes and pale lips. after you introduce yourself you repeat her name,  _lexa_ , feel it skitter around your mouth for the first time, feel the sharp edges in the middle and the gentle start.

you walk with her to another booth after she pays for her lavender soap with perfectly exact change. the owner is kind, keeps her own bees with her wife, offers you a sample. lexa is careful when she tastes it, only a small amount, but you squeeze the tiny stick into your mouth quickly, the plastic fading away until there’s only cinnamon, only honey.

//

lexa teaches eleventh grade literature, you find out, and is demanding and difficult and talks to you for hours in bed about the state of education, after your fifth date, topless and wine drunk and full; you think she’s happy.

you think you’re happy too, and you listen to her tell you about her favorite books, and her favorite students. you kiss her and it’s easy, how her breasts fit i in your hands, the way her hips cant up against yours, the bruise the color of the storm sunset you suck into the inside of her thigh while she mumbles something in a language you don’t know, the pulse that thrums, so strong, against your hand when you press lightly against her throat and she moans, bites her lip, sighs and trips and falls into an orgasm that’s so beautiful it makes you ache.

it’s easy, you think, and she touches you with a startling tenderness, something that shakes you to your core, when her tongue makes you see stars and she kisses you after, tasting yourself against her teeth. 

she falls asleep afterward, tucked into you gently, messy and young and very human. you wait for her eyes to shift back and forth under her thin eyelids, and you briefly wonder what she’s dreaming about. you go out to your stoop—you had promised your mother you wanted your first floor apartment in the brownstone in park slope, even with the shitty plumbing and one window duct taped shut, instead of the brand new one she wanted you to have, in a building in midtown—and chain smoke. they’re the worst menthols, but finn used to smoke them and they burn your lungs, mint and ghosts.

lexa is different, though, you try to remind yourself. she’s softer, physically, small and slight and lanky; harder, emotionally, you think, stubborn and angry sometimes. she is strikingly funny and passionate, though, which they had in common. 

you have only known her for thirty-four days, but you want to love her.

you think you do.

you light another cigarette and the tip glows orange, crackles when you breathe it in. you hold it in your chest and then let it out, streetlamps and hidden stars and curling, shimmering grief.

//

you climb in bed and lexa mumbles something along the lines of, ‘are you okay?’

‘yeah,’ you say, kiss the nape of her neck gently. you force yourself to be so tender and it hurts you, the jut of her ribs under your fingers, her easy breath. ‘go back to sleep.’

//

she grew up in foster care, you learn, when she’s grading papers and you’re lounging on her couch trying to distract her with commentary about the episode of catfish you’re watching, and she sighs and taps her pen but you catch her smiling, just slightly.

she says it, soon after, just like that: ‘i grew up in foster care,’ and you don’t know what to do, not really, because she goes back to grading and nev is interviewing someone in the background and you’re stuck in this moment.

‘lexa,’ you finally decide on, walk up to her and pull out the chair next to her.

she won’t look at you and you’re not sure if she’s about to cry or not, but you take the pen out of her hand and say her name again.

she finally swallows and meets your eyes, and you take off her glasses and tug her toward you. it’s awkward, because the table is between you, and there are papers scattered everywhere, and she doesn’t cry. she trembles, her face pressed into the crook of your neck, your arms around her. she makes more sense now, and you’re relieved to understand her reticence at certain things that have to do with your parents, her fierceness for her students.

you have nothing to offer her out loud, not really: you can’t take away what she tells you about over the next months, years—scattered whispers about the garbage bag all of her belongings fit into, the house that let her take all of their harry potter books before they moved away, the older couple who made sure to learn the way she liked her sandwiches, the way she got the scars on her left shoulder blade.

you can’t take it away now, the instability and fear and anger. but you hold her while she shakes, all of her body trying to keep itself together, too much below her skin.

‘i’m not going anywhere,’ you say, and it feels true, it feels real.

she swallows against your skin. ‘okay,’ she says, takes a deep breath, steadies herself and straightens and looks right at you. ‘okay.’

//

you’re at a party that raven and octavia are throwing. lexa is drunk and she spots you from across the room, holding two beers, and her face blooms into a loose, easy smile.

your chest blooms too, something inside you releasing, just a little bit. she’s funny and a terrible dancer and you kiss her in the middle of a party, someone projecting an old episode of sex & the city on the wall with a drake song blaring in the background. you’re almost a doctor, almost finished with med school, and lexa’s knee hurts when it rains from when she was a long jumper in high school and she has ninety students to take care of—but you feel sixteen again, when she offers you her hand, the space between her thumb and forefinger lined with salt, and you take a shot of tequila and suck on her fingers and her pupils are blown and you kiss her like you’re young, like you’ve never lost anyone.

//

you tell lexa about finn when she goes home with you for the weekend. 

‘i loved someone, before you.’

she goes very still from where she was studying the sketches and polaroids and awards pinned to your wall, all the way back from high school. you watch her set her shoulders, so stiffly, and turn to you. she’s regal, hard and harsh and cold, and you sigh and walk over to her and take her hand before you can take anything back, before she can run, before you can process that you essentially told her that you love her.

‘he died,’ you say, and she swallows.

‘i am very sorry,’ she says, softly and accented, just slightly, like all of her weight is behind the words.

you nod and you kiss her, taste the salt of your tears. you lay her down on your childhood bed and your parents are bickering in the backyard over whether or not to season the chicken with oregano and her breath rattles around in her chest, a whoosh, a residual cough from a cold earlier in the month. 

‘tell me what you need,’ you say. it comes out needy, full of want, and she’s sprawled below you, a bruise blooming on her collarbone.

‘you,’ she says, pulls your shirt over your head and unhooks your bra, kisses down your chest until she can take a nipple into her mouth and you bite back a moan.

she looks at you. it’s simple and deep and  _something_ courses through you: she knows you love her; she’s here trusting you, and you’ve kissed her scars and you know the way she likes her coffee and that she cannot under any circumstances handle cold medicine; that her birthday is in the very middle of may, bright and finally warm.

‘i need you, clarke,’ she says, and, just like that, it doesn’t hurt quite so much.

//

her hands are strong, working out the knots in your neck from your marathon shift.

‘it’s so amazing,’ she says, ‘what you’re able to do.’

you shrug.

she kisses down your back. 

‘it  _is_ , clarke,’ she says, like she’s the ultimate authority on everything.

you laugh once, and she traces down your spine. ‘if you say so,’ you grant her, smile into the pillow at the satisfied little noise she makes after.

//

she doesn’t text you back for two days, and you’re just about to go knock down her door when your phone rings.

‘lexa?’

‘no,’ is the response, ‘it’s anya.’

you’ve met anya a grand total of four times; she’s lexa’s roommate and they’ve known each other for a long time, apparently. she’s beautiful and scowls a lot and once took a beer straight out of your hand as she walked past you on the couch to her room.

‘uh, hey?’

‘i have lexa. which apartment is yours?’

‘1F,’ you say, your heart pounding, and then your buzzer goes off and you press it to let them in.

you open the front door and anya deposits a drooping, drunk lexa just inside your front door. she has bloody knuckles and a split lip and a black eye that’s already swelling shut.

anya looks at you very intensely and lexa’s kind of falling over into you, grasping at your t-shirt and mumbling into your neck.

‘she picked a fight at a bar.’

‘oh,’ is all you have to say.

‘you’re a doctor, you’ll be fine,’ anya says, depositing lexa’s keys in the bowl on the table by the door. ‘she told me that you love her.’

‘i do,’ you say, before you can bring yourself to do anything else. ‘i love her a lot.’

anya nods. ‘tell her to text me tomorrow,’ she says, turns on her heel and shuts the door.

you lead lexa to your kitchen and help her sit on your table, where the light is best. you go get your first aid kit and when you swipe alcohol across her bloody knuckles she clenches her jaw but doesn’t make a sound.

you’re angry at her, furiously so, because she’s hurt and she ignored you for two days with no warning and you had told her you wouldn’t leave but she never told you the same thing.

‘one of my students died,’ she says, wrecked, while you’re holding her jaw in your hand softly, inspecting the bruise around her eye. your whole chest clenches and she tries to hold in a sob but eventually her ribs heave and her lips tremble. 

‘i’m so sorry, lexa.’

‘you’re angry with me,’ she says.

‘yes.’

she nods, swallows, wipes her tears and tries to get up. you shake your head and push her back down, your hands gentle on her shoulders.

‘i’m sorry,’ she says, grabs at your hip with one gauze-swathed hand, clean and healing, already. she tangles her fingers in your shirt. ‘clarke.’

you nod and kiss her, her split lip spilling blood into both of your mouths.

//

‘he was kind,’ she tells you the next morning, sore and battered, sitting up in your bed. ‘he was tall and smart and always pronounced words wrong to make the class laugh, even when he knew i’d give him deductions.’

you smile; you’d brought breakfast to her and you feed her a bite of fresh bread, torn and warm, and it makes her breathe deeper, more peacefully, just slightly.

it’s an offering, a holy communion, some kind of way to digest lost, and sustenance, and love.

//

you’re grocery shopping together for the week and she wanders off to inspect grapefruits; she’s kind of a mess, in shorts you think used to be lincoln’s swim trunks and the worst sneakers you have ever seen, a hoodie crooked on her neck. you smile at the odd little cadence of her steps, like she’s counting them in her head, and set out to get cocoa puffs because she loves them but has too much dignity to put them in the cart for herself. 

her strong arms wrap around you from behind, her soft hair and lavender, always, while you’re reaching for microwave popcorn.

‘i love you,’ she says, kisses your cheek.

your heart  _races_ , and you turn around and press her up against the crackers on the other side of the aisle, kiss her hard and soft and deep, until some cheese-it’s fall on her head and someone clears their throat.

she’s laughing and you  _love_  her. you take her hand you buy your groceries.

//

you’re sitting with your dad at your lake house, swatting lazily at a gnat, sipping on a beer while lexa and your mom try to coherently get into the two person kayak.

it’s not too hot, finally, getting out of the city, and it rained silver last night. you had run out with lexa, naked, and swam under the stars, everything mercury.

she laughs with your mom, who adores her, and they set out steadily.

‘i bought a ring.’

it’s been three years, so many arguments over where to order dinner from, and what to watch on tv, the one time she didn’t want to wear dress pants to one of your work events and you had flung a water bottle across the room because you had worked forty-eight hours and stood for thirteen of them, straight, in a surgery where your patient died anyway, right underneath your hands. 

it’s been three years of her balled up, mismatched socks, and the new sneakers you make sure to get her every six months, protest or not; she makes you smoothies for every morning, keeps a little box of notes from her students hidden in the corner of your closet, even though you’re sure she knows you know about it. you found an apartment together, one that she searched for because you love windows and light and she loves you. she makes sure you take your antidepressants, has an alarm on her own phone to remind her to remind you. you always order cilantro on the side when you get tacos, because she hates it; you buy her spiced whiskey in the winter and kiss her in the snow.

your dad grins. ‘i like her better than you anyway.’

you shove him and he tugs you close, kisses the top of your head.

//

you meet lexa at the park near her school, where her students are having a potluck. you bring brownies that lincoln made, because you had burnt your first batch and forgotten flour in your second. 

lexa’s students tease her relentlessly when you give her a kiss on the cheek and she very sternly pretends to put them all in detention before they all start laughing and she takes your hand. you sit under a tree on a blanket, with lexa and a few kids who come to talk to her. 

one girl, one of lexa’s favorites, you know, looks at you and says, ‘tell us how you  _really_  proposed, because we don’t believe ms. woods.’

lexa rolls her eyes and you grin. you tell them about going to the pier at one in the morning after walking around on the first warm day of spring, and how lexa had picked you flowers and you’d tied them together clumsily to make her a crown, and you’d gotten pizza and beers from a bodega and snuck into the park so that you could skip rocks on the beach by the river, the city skyline shimmering across from you. you tell them how you’d sat next to her and offered her the ring in the palm of your hand, shining and simple.

lexa’s favorite kid sighs. ‘that’s so romantic,’ she says.

you leave out the part about how you had almost gotten caught by a cop having semi-public sex in a public park on a beach, but lexa blushes anyway.

//

you go to the market after her birthday. she smiles and the love in your body feels like too much, and you’re afraid you might cry, so you shove on your sunglasses and take her hand, brush your thumb over her pulse, over the small scar at the base of her palm.

‘love you,’ she says, kisses the side of your head, her baseball cap crooked and her freckles just starting to bloom.

she walks off, fingers laced with yours, so you follow.

she tastes sweet when you kiss her later: only cinnamon, only honey.


End file.
